BlogmyQuery – BMQ

Finding ways to earn passive income is a growing concern among many freelance designers. I’ve always loved client work, but I have to admit that the pressure of juggling multiple bosses and constant deadlines eventually started to wear me down.

As a result, in the past couple of years I’ve been focusing more and more on personal projects, and thinking about ways to make money from them. I’ve sold themes and templates and written an eBook, and I’m now focusing on launching my own job board for designers.

In a previous article for Smashing Magazine, I compared various ways to sell software products online. What I’ll do in this article is not just compare ways in which freelance designers can earn passive income, but speak about my own experience in exploring these avenues.

And, yes, that will include telling you how much money I’ve made!

Disclaimer: This post is about my own personal experience. Just because I have, for example, never made much money from ads does not mean you can’t. So, please take this as a “Here’s what I did,� not as a “Here’s what you should do.�

Themes

I was lucky enough to join ThemeForest (the biggest themes and template marketplace on the Web) in January 2009, shortly after it launched. ThemeForest seemed like the perfect way for an unknown, inexperienced designer to make money: no need for a fancy degree or years of experience — just design something cool and the market will reward you. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Top designers now gross six-figure annual incomes solely from selling themes, and some do so despite being relative unknowns in the rest of the design world.

So, what was the result of my own venture into theme-making?

Overall, it was very positive. First, it helped me launch my design career, because my first couple of freelance clients were all people who contacted me after seeing my templates. It was also lucrative: in June 2010, my best month ever, I made $1,248. For a year after that, having not even launched new themes, my existing ones still made me around $200 a month, with minimal effort on my part.

The high point of my ThemeForest career.

Altogether, I’ve earned around $12,675 from ThemeForest in two and a half years; nothing to scoff at, especially because I completely stopped supporting my themes about a year ago. So, if selling themes is so great, why did I design the last one more than two years ago? There are a couple reasons for this, the main one being that the market drastically changed, and customer expectations changed with it.

Designing a good-looking theme isn’t enough anymore. If you want your theme to be competitive, you need to support shortcodes, build a custom back end and design multiple layouts, not to mention provide excellent support and build a documentation website.

In other words, in the span of a couple years, building themes went from something that you could do on the side to being a full-time job. Because I didn’t want to become a WordPress guru and spend all of my time creating themes, I decided to put theme design aside.

My most successful theme.

Theme design, then, is one of the best ways a designer can earn passive income, but it’s also one of the hardest. By the way, another important factor to consider is that theme design makes sense only if you’re in it for the long run and can reinvest the time you spend on a theme into subsequent ones (by reusing bits of code, streamlining the process, building a mailing list, etc.).

Pros:

• Very lucrative if you’re successful.
• No need for experience or education, as long as you have the right skills.
• No need to be famous or have a big following.

Cons:

• Requires a lot of HTML and CSS coding, and probably familiarity with WordPress or another CMS.
• Providing good support is time-consuming.
• You will probably need to launch more than one theme before the venture becomes more profitable than regular freelance work.

Icons And Vectors

Note: I have never released any icon packs, brushes or vector resources, so I asked Vincent Le Moign of Webalys for his thoughts on this market.

“I started to create passive income by accident. In 10 years of freelancing, I’ve created a small stock of vector graphic elements that I’ve been using repeatedly for interface design. At first, it was just a few Illustrator files, where I pasted GUI elements, such as buttons and icons, to reuse in future projects.

“In June 2010, I decided to make it comprehensive and consistent, and then release it for free. Inspired by Web application frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, the User Interface Design Framework was based on the concept of modularity, productivity and fast wireframing.�

Statistics from the launch of the User Interface Design Framework. Large preview.

“It took me a few weeks to create it, without making any money on it, but the feedback was impressive: in two months, 52 000 unique visitors, more than 1000 tweets, dozen of blog posts. Even the godfather of Web design, Jeffrey Zeldman, reviewed it. I was high on a cloud!

“Looking at it now, I have no idea why I invested so much time doing it — probably because of passion, and I felt the urge to fill a gap: this kind of tool was missing. I didn’t make any conscious plan, but this is how my new career started. Seeing this steady traffic, I thought I could build a premium version on top of it. A few month later, I launched a commercial pack filled with 750 vector icons. Then the magic happened.â€�

The Minicons icon pack.

“Money started to add up in my PayPal account. I remember checking my inbox compulsively to see if the latest emails announced sales. It wasn’t a lot of sales yet, just a few hundreds dollars, but it showed me the way: that making a living from passive income was possible. In the past two years, the sales gradually went up and reached the point where I could stop working for customers and spend 100% of my time on my own products. In 2011, I launched one more resource: a vintage vector ornaments pack, which was successful, too. Having two different products guaranteed a more regular income flow.

“I currently earn a few thousands dollars each month from sales. My income is the same as what it was when I was a freelancer, but I have the satisfaction of developing my own products. But designing quality content is not enough to make sales. I actually spend most of my time on other tasks:

• Creating the sales pages, writing the text, polishing the product websites.
• Setting up the e-commerce solution. In two years I’ve wasted a lot of time building the sales process. I switched e-commerce solutions four times until I found the perfect one (DPD — almost unknown but highly recommended).
• Advertising and promoting. I spent a lot of time and money finding the best sources of traffic.
• Improving marketing and SEO, and setting up and learning how to use products such as MailChimp, Google Analytics, GetClicky, SEOmoz, Curebit.
• Optimizing the conversion rate by setting up A/B tests with Google Optimizer.
• To be honest, I don’t provide a lot of support (a few minutes a day), but I commit to responding as soon as possible. And I spent a lot of time writing the documentation (with screenshots) to avoid answering the same questions over and over again.

“So if you’re considering creating premium resources, the answer is yes, you can live off of it. But your creativity and designs skills are not the keys elements of success. You’ll need to invest a lot of time in learning and practicing all areas of business: marketing, promotion, copywriting, SEO, analytics, etc.

“Actually, this is the beauty of launching your own products: you will become a better designer not by creating better graphics, but because you will have a full view of the business and will master a full range of skills. You will see your customer with new eyes and focus on the efficiency of your designs more than their outer beauty. And believe me, your customer will love that and will pay you more if you increase their sales.

“On the downside, the market is becoming highly competitive. The same shift that is taking place with templates is happening in my market. Competition is becoming fierce, and not a week goes by without a few more icon packs getting released. I mean, which designer hasn’t launched their own set by now?

“I’ve counted more than 50 competitors who sell icons, and the number and quality is improving constantly.�

A sample of the Vectorian vector pack.

“Also, the growing trend of discounted bundles (like on Dealotto and MightyDeals), where you get a ton of resources for a few bucks, risks drying up the market. I’m still not sure if this will convince more designers to add these resources in their workflow, thus expanding the market, or stop them from buying these packs at the current prices.

“This tougher competition has forced me to spend months this year doubling the number of my icons, from 750 to 1500, and adding variations for different software, such as PowerPoint and Keynote. Also, I’ve improved my other product, the vector ornaments, and paid another freelancer to fix a few problems. And I recently paid a great calligrapher to create a logo for Vectorian and improve the branding. Expenses and time investment are going up.

“Another problem: I don’t think my designs are as creative or as good as before. I’m so focused on creating the content, marketing it and thinking like a business owner that I sometimes have less passion for design and less creativity.�

Pros:

• You already have the skills to create the content.
• If you use marketplaces such as iStockphoto and GraphicRiver, you don’t need to build a website or promote your products.
• Almost no support is required (if you write good documentation).
• You will expand your skills and become more business-oriented.
• You don’t need to write in English (this was a big advantage for me because I’m French and a poor English writer).

Cons:

• It’s time-consuming.
• The expectations of quality and quantity are rising. And more and more free content is becoming available.
• The market is competitive; you need not only great content, but great marketing.

Advertising

I can still remember when Carbon first accepted one of my websites into its advertising network. I was overjoyed! At last, I would be able to dip into the river of money that flows into Internet advertising! Of course, I didn’t expect to earn a salary from ads alone, but I thought it might be a nice supplement — say, a couple of hundred dollars a month.

If you’ve ever run any kind of ads on a website, you know what’s coming: my first payment must’ve been for something like $5. So, yes, Internet ads are no fun — unless you bring in a massive amount of traffic (or if you plaster your website with a massive number of ads).

My first ever ad spot.

Since then, I’ve joined Fusion Ads for my blog and joined Yoggrt for The Toolbox (both ad networks belong to BuySellAds). To give you some numbers, The Toolbox gets about 20,000 uniques a month, which is not huge but still decent. This converts to $30 to 60 per month. My blog is a little more successful (probably due to the higher click-through rate), and I’ve succeeded in pulling in $100 or $200 in extremely good months when a couple of my posts went viral. But the average has been around $50 to $100.

Altogether, the total from advertising comes in at around $600 over six months. So, as far as I’m concerned, ads are a good way to pay for a meal to celebrate the weekend, but not much more unless you decide to become a full-time blogger.

Pros:

• Does not require any work.
• Joining a respected ad network will give your website cachet.

Cons:

• Pays for a meal, if you’re lucky.
• Did I mention that you probably won’t earn anything?

Books

Writing an eBook (or plain old book) might seem relatively easy. After all, we all know how to write, right? In fact, I’d say that actually writing the book is not the hardest part. Sure, developing a good writing style takes years of practice, but the truth is that people will forgive clumsy writing if you have something valuable to say. No, the real work in writing eBooks is in what comes before and after the writing.

Before writing the first word, you need to come up with a good topic and, more importantly, develop the skills necessary to make you an authority on the topic. Simply compiling existing knowledge might work for a blog post, but it won’t fly when you ask people to hand out their hard-earned cash.

Consider writing an eBook only if you have a couple of years of experience under your belt and feel ready to distill it into a book. And please don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s over once you’re done writing. That’s actually when the real battle begins: selling your book.

My eBook’s landing page.

How will people find out about your book? What reason will they have to buy it? Why should they buy yours instead of competing books? These are the kinds of questions you’ll have to face.

If you want to rest your chances on a personal website, take a page from Jarrod Drysdale’s book (pun intended), Bootstrapping Design. Drysdale not only set up a website for his book, but also used a mailing list before and after the launch to promote it by sending out sample chapters and asking his audience various questions. I did my best to promote my eBook by setting up a landing page, writing guest posts about it and holding giveaways.

Another good strategy is to target a niche. This is what I did by focusing specifically on user interface design for startups, and Matthew Butterick also did it with his Typography for Lawyers book.

Last but not least, I strongly recommend partnering up with websites such as AppSumo and Hyperink to open up distributions channels for your book and to create new revenue streams.

Sales started strong but have slowed to a couple per week.

Writing an eBook turned out to be great for me. I had a great launch, making about $8,000 in the first two weeks alone. Since then, sales have slowed considerably, but I did manage to make another $6,000 in the four months since the launch. In my case, the key to earning more was partnering up with AppSumo and Dealotto, which both brought in a couple of thousand dollars in extra revenue after the initial boost from the launch faded away.

Pros:

• Almost no support needed.
• No technical skills required.

Cons:

• You need to have something to say.
• A lot of promotion is required.
• The market is competitive and crowded.
• Sales will quickly dry out after launch.

Software As A Service

Building a business requires a ton of work and commitment, but unlike freelance design or, say, mowing lawns, building a software-based service of some kind takes away the 1:1 relationship between your efforts and your income. Some services charge only once, as is the case with job boards such as Authentic Jobs and my own Folyo. But, of course, the cash cow of passive income is subscription services because they enable you to anticipate your cash flow and build a steady income stream.

The obvious challenge in building a software service is that it requires technical skill, which you might not have if you’ve got a design background. It’s not the end of the world, though. You could find a cofounder, outsource the project or even learn the skills yourself. And you don’t need to go all out right away. When I speak with non-technical founders, I often notice that a preliminary version of their idea could very well have been achieved with a simple WordPress blog.

If you explore a little deeper, you’ll realize that opportunities for monetization are everywhere. For example, WordPress has numerous membership subscription plugins. Even MailChimp lets you charge for newsletter subscriptions. By thinking outside the box and combining existing services, even a moderately technical person can get a minimum viable product out the door.

I launched Folyo (a website that helps startups find great, vetted freelance designers) about a year ago:

Folyo, a private job board for freelance design projects.

For the first couple months, I ran it as a simple newsletter of job offers, with a Wufoo form for submitting projects. There was no back end, no database and no user accounts! This was enough to validate the concept and to motivate me to build a real app. So, I found a Ruby on Rails developer through a Hacker News jobs thread and paid him about $3,000 to create a working app (a process I cover in more detail on my blog).

Meanwhile, I had been learning Ruby on Rails myself, so I’ve since taken on part of the development myself, outsourcing the remainder to a friend in exchange for some design work. Was it worth it? While I have no doubt I would be earning more if I was focusing on freelance work rather than Folyo, I’m still very happy that I decided to launch my own project.

I currently make about $1,000 a month from Folyo, which is good enough for one person with minimal costs after one year. More importantly, each day spent working on Folyo makes it a little better and increases the website’s value (unlike with client work, where working on one project doesn’t help you with the next).

Of course, when I’m working on Folyo, I do very little actual designing. In fact, my time breaks down something like this:

• Email and support: 20%
• Blogging: 20%
• Coding: 40%
• Miscellaneous tasks: 10%
• Design: 10%

So, if you’re thinking of launching your own service, consider that it probably means spending much less time designing.

Pros:

• Theoretically, it can be lucrative and even get you bought out by Google or Facebook.
• The work is very motivating.
• You have the freedom to build anything you want.

Cons:

• You will need to step way outside of your comfort zone.
• The chance of failure is high.
• At the end of the day, relatively little designing is involved.

Lessons Learned

What did I learn from all this? And what would I do differently if I could start over? Well, one thing I realized is the importance of building a network. You need to find a way to get connected, whether it’s by becoming a famous designer, writing a blog, building a Twitter following or, ideally, doing all that and more.

Of course, a lot of great designers focus simply on doing a great job and don’t concern themselves too much with the rest. But maybe these designers went to a great art school and kept in touch with their classmates. Or maybe they attend design meetups regularly. One way or another, you can bet that most successful designers maintain a network, even if they don’t realize it.

Blogs and Twitter are simply the digital equivalent of this. Making it entirely on your own is very hard, so the earlier you start cultivating these relationships, the better.

Related to this, have a strong identity. Try to stand out from the crowd, and make sure people know who you are. You can achieve this by cultivating your own style, being involved in high-profile or viral projects or, what I think is the best way, launching your own projects.

Visual Idiot’s humor at work.

If you want to see how it’s done, look no further than Visual Idiot, who converted his great design skills and weird sense of humor into a job at GoSquared, despite no one on the Internet even knowing his real name.

This may sound obvious, but the reality is that projects that help build your network or identity are not often the most lucrative ones (actually, they usually don’t make you any money). So, it’s tempting to take that high-paying contract to design a pharmaceutical company’s intranet, rather than spend a couple days building a silly JavaScript that replaces stuff with pictures of cats.

But guess what? Nobody outside of Big Pharma will ever see that intranet’s beautifully crafted pixels, but that cat website might go viral and lead to thousands of people suddenly becoming aware of your existence.

To summarize, the main lesson I’ve learned over the last couple of years is to have a long-term view and invest in yourself, not chase a quick buck.

The plan is rather simple, then: build a network, cultivate a strong identity to ensure the network knows who you are, and then come up with a product you can market to it.

Of course, each step usually takes a couple years. I said it was simple; I didn’t say it was easy!

(al) (il)

© Sacha G for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

There’s a realization that every freelance designer must go through at some point: client work isn’t enough to ensure your long-term financial security. What if you get sick? What if you can’t find clients? What if you want to take a vacation?

One possible answer to this problem is earning passive income — i.e. selling products or services instead of selling your own time. A common way to do this is to sell digital goods such as eBooks, PSD templates, WordPress themes, icons, and so on. But how exactly should you sell them?

Although there are lots of marketplaces for selling digital goods, they often take a big cut of the profits. What’s more, they don’t let you customize the sales page, or let you use your own brand. This is where digital goods services come in. These services only take care of the payment, file storage, and download, and let you do the rest. This means you can easily sell your products from your own website, or through social networks.

I recently wrote an eBook about UI design and needed to find a way to sell it, so I compared five such services: Quixly, FetchApp, Pulley, E-junkie, and Gumroad. I’ll tell you which one I picked at the end… but in the meantime, here are the results of my research.

How Does This Work?

First of all, let’s see how those systems actually work. Simply said, all these services let you upload some files, provide you with a link that you put on your site, and take care of the rest. The customer flow usually looks something like this:

1. Alice clicks the “Buy” button on your website
2. Alice briefly goes through the digital goods website, and is automatically redirected to the payment processor
3. Alice pays for your product with Paypal, Google Checkout, etc.
4. Alice is then redirected to the digital goods service, where she can download the product

Payment Processors

Let’s take a moment to look at that second step. Most digital goods services do not deal with the big credit card companies directly, but instead go through payment processors such as Paypal or Google Checkout.

This means that you need to take into account the additional fees charged by these companies (the standard fee for both service is a 2.9% charge plus a $0.30 fixed fee per transaction). The only service which does notgo through a payment processor is Gumroad, meaning it lets customers pay right there on Gumroad. Now that we have a basic understanding of how things work, let’s take a look at each service.

Quixly

Large view.

Quixly is the brainchild of the tireless Drew Wilson, who’s also the man behind BuildItWith.me, Pictos, and many other projects.

• Supported payment processors: Paypal, Google Checkout
• Used by: Kyle Steed, others
• Pros: cheapest option in many cases; nice UI
• Cons: limited bandwidth
• Special feature: sales reports and visualizations

FetchApp

Large view.

FetchApp was originally — and still is — a Shopify app (in fact, the first ever!) but has since taken a life of its own. According to FetchApp’s Mike Larkin, it’s “simple enough to be used to sell a single product, but large enough to also accommodate record labels selling hundreds of tracks”.

• Supported payment processors: Paypal, Google Checkout, Shopify, Goodsie, FoxyCart
• Used by: A Book Apart, Vector Mill, and others
• Pros: can be easily integrated with Shopify; has an API; lots of documentation
• Cons: doesn’t provide stats
• Special feature: lets you create multiple products without re-uploading the same files

Pulley

Large view.

Pulley is an offshoot of BigCartel; a hosted shopping cart system similar to Shopify.

• Supported payment processors: Paypal, BigCartel
• Used by: Cameron Moll, Fine Goods, and others
• Pros: can be easily integrated with BigCartel
• Cons: no direct download step (users have to check their email)
• Special feature: cheapest 100MB storage plan

E-junkie

Large view.

E-junkie has been around for quite a while, and it shows in its homepage and dashboard’s design. But it’s also the most full-featured service by far.

Gumroad

Large view.

Gumroad is a relative newcomer in this field, but has been generating a lot of buzz. Unlike the other systems, it doesn’t have a monthly fee, and instead charges a fixed cost plus a percentage on each transaction.

What’s more, Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia points out that his service is the only one to deal with credit card companies directly: “everyone else uses PayPal as their main processor or sole processor. This means that they’re just making PayPal bigger, and will never own the entire experience.”

This is a strong argument in Gumroad’s favor, since having to deal with less intermediaries is always better. And this means Gumroad works even in countries where Paypal isn’t available, such as Serbia or Pakistan.

• Supported payment processors: credit card
• Used by: 39Argyle, others
• Pros: no monthly fees; supports credit cards; works in countries where Paypal doesn’t (Serbia, Pakistan, etc.)
• Cons: expensive for cheaper, high-volume products
• Special feature: pays you all of your profits at the end of the month

Other Options

Of course, there are a lot of other options, such as Payloadz, Digital Delivery, and one of Paypal’s many confusing services. But I decided to focus on these five because they seem to be the most commonly used among Web designers. Hopefully this article will give you the tools to evaluate other options by yourself if you need to.

Pricing

FetchApp, Pulley, Quixly, and E-junkie all work the same way — they have pricing tiers corresponding to file sizes (and sometimes the total number of files you’re selling), but all have unlimited bandwidth.

Note that Quixly has relatively cheaper pricing tiers (free, $10 / month, and $30 / month), but charges $0.40 extra per GB of bandwidth when over the limit for each tier.

On top of this, all four services require a payment processor, which charges its own fee (usually 2.9% + $0.30).

On the other hand, Gumroad’s pricing model is completely different. Instead of charging a fixed monthly fee, Gumroad takes a fixed fee ($0.30) plus a percentage (5%) for each sale. It’s important to point out that Gumroad does not charge Paypal’s 2.9%, even when it’s time to transfer your earnings to your Paypal account.

For this comparison, I’ll imagine three use cases and then see which service works best for each of them.

Use Case #1: Selling A Short eBook

Let’s say we’re selling a short eBook for $10. The file is pretty light, let’s say 9MB, and we sell 100 a month, using up 900MB of bandwidth, earning a total of $1000.

Quixly is the cheapest option, since we’re within the limits of its free plan. Although FetchApp also has a free plan, it’s only for files up to 1MB. So for small files, Quixly comes out ahead unless you really plan to use up a ton of bandwidth.

And what about Gumroad? Well, since they charge you extra for each sale, it doesn’t make sense to use them in this case unless you know you’re only going to sell your product a couple of times.

Use Case #2: Selling A WordPress Theme

Our WordPress theme comes with all the PSD sources and a lot of documentation, so it weighs in at 70MB. We sell 50 per month for $30, coming up at 3.5GB of bandwidth per month and $1500 of revenue.

For our second use case, Pulley is the best option, thanks to their entry plan that goes up to 100MB in storage. That being said, for a couple of megs (more or less) another service might reveal itself cheaper.

So I’d say the mid-size files category has no clear winner — but Quixly, FetchApp, and Pulley are all safe bets.

Again, Gumroad’s model reveals itself a little expensive for our use case. So who exactly is that service for? Read on to find out…

Use Case #3: Selling A High-Def Video

Our video is high-def, 1080p goodness and it’s a whopping 4GB. We expect to sell 10 per month at $50, so that’s 40GB of monthly bandwidth and we’ll earn $500.

The clear winner here is Gumroad, since it doesn’t care about bandwidth or file size. For files that you only expect to sell a couple of times, it can be a very interesting model, especially if those files are big and you sell them for a low price.

Quixly is also an attractive option, but if you’re dealing with big files, watch out for Quixly’s extra bandwidth costs! Let’s say instead of selling 10 videos, we sell 100, putting our bandwidth at 400GB. That’s 400-60=340GB over the limit, which will cost us 340*0.4=$136 extra!

Thankfully, Quixly will warn you before you reach that limit, which will give you the time to switch to another provider. Still, if you expect to have big bandwidth costs, you might be better off choosing another service from the start.

What About Marketplaces?

Marketplaces, like ThemeForest or the other Envato websites, are also a great way to sell digital goods, and should be seriously considered. Sure, you give up a big chunk of your earnings (one usually keeps between 50% and 70% of each sale). But on the other hand, a lot more people will see your product and buy it.

And don’t forget you can also sell your stuff non-exclusively (i.e. in addition to one of the services we’ve already discussed), although be warned that if you choose to go that route, you’ll get an even lower cut of the profits (only 33% on Envato websites).

I would say that marketplaces are a good fit for people who would prefer not to take care of their product’s marketing, or are selling a lot of similar items. They also make more sense for certain items (like WordPress themes, or stock photography) than others.

The Self-Hosted Solution

Another solution is hosting the whole thing yourself. For example, WordPress users can get the free WooCommerce pluginto set up a shopping cart and then hook it up to Paypal or many other payment processors.

While this approach is cheaper in the long run, it does take a lot more time to set up, and requires more technical skills (so it’s not for everybody). But if you’re trying to build a business out of selling digital goods, it can be a very interesting option.

Conclusion

So which service is best for you? Without generalizing too much, here are some broad guidelines:

• If you want to avoid payment processor limitations: Gumroad
• If your file is small (<10MB): Quixly
• If you need the exposure: A Marketplace
• If you need a shopping cart: FetchApp or Pulley
• If you need advanced features: E-junkie
• If you want to build an online store: WooCommerce

You might be wondering which service I picked for myself. I hesitated between Quixly, Pulley, and FetchApp because they all looked great, but in the end Quixly’s beautiful user interface and detailed reports won me over.

After using it for a few days, I have to say the visual reports, although not a core feature, are a very nice touch to see how your sales are doing. But I did get a sizable number of people who encountered problems with Paypal, or didn’t buy altogether because they didn’t have a Paypal account.

So I’ve decided to let people choose for themselves between Gumroad (if they want to pay by Credit Card) or Quixly (if they want to pay via Paypal). The great thing is that since Gumroad doesn’t charge a subscription, there’s no extra costs in adding it as a second service. And I will probably give FetchApp and Pulley a try soon as well to compare them with Quixly.

The great things with having so many options is that everybody can find the one that suits them the best. So I encourage you to try out and compare these services for yourself!

What I’d like to see

This is clearly a very dynamic space, and I’m sure we’ll see lots of evolution in these products in the coming month. Here’s some of the features I’d love to see:

• Let user pick their own preferred way of paying: Even though most services support multiple ways of paying, the seller can only pick one at a time. I would love to see an intermediary step that lets users choose their own favorite payment method.
• Improve stats and reporting: I would love to see reports generalized across every product, as well as more advanced features like filtering, export, etc.
• Discount code support: When marketing an online product, you need every tool in the arsenal!
• No fixed fees: Paying a fixed $0.30 fee on every transaction is a killer when you’re selling something for under $5.

I’m definitely going to keep an eye on all five services to see what they come up with. In the meantime, I hope this guide has been useful to you, and that you’re now ready to start making money!

(jvb)

© Sacha G for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

I recently had to design a couple of teaser pages for a client and a personal project, and this led me to think about what exactly makes for a good teaser page — or to be more precise a “coming soon” page that companies often put up before they’re ready to launch their product. After careful research and many scientific tests in the brand new field of teaserology, I’ve developed a patented Teaser Effectiveness Analysis Matrixâ„¢, consisting of four elements. The perfect teaser page must score high on all four axis of the following:

• Memorability,
• Virality,
• Desirability,
• Data collection-ability.

I know that “data collection-ability� is not proper English, but inventing new words is one of the perks of being a scientist. As we’ll see, most teaser pages focus strongly on two or three of these elements but rarely hit all four.

Why Do I Need A Teaser?

Even though people seem to put out a teaser website for anything these days, let’s step back and think about why one would need a teaser. After all, putting one together takes time and energy, and you could argue that the effort would be better spent on the product itself.

But a teaser can go a long way to ensuring a successful launch. Raising awareness of your product long before it ships makes sense: people are more likely to interact with your app if they’re somewhat familiar with it, so letting them hear about it as soon (and as much) as possible helps. Ideally, you would create a climate of anticipation, and make people look forward to the release date. People love to know in advance about the next big thing, and you can use it to your advantage.

A Powerful Motivating Tool

Another factor that is not as obvious but perhaps even more important is motivation. When you’re working hard on something, without any guarantee of success, doubting yourself and losing motivation is easy, and this circumstance often leads people to abandon otherwise promising projects.

Raising awareness and collecting email addresses long before launch does two things to combat this lack of motivation. First, by putting the project out there, you make it much harder for yourself to quit, because we all hate to let people down. Secondly, pre-registering users shows you that there’s actual demand for what you’re building, which goes a long way to silencing those gnawing doubts. In this context, the teaser is a vital part of any product’s Web strategy.

Now that we know the why, let’s look at the how, and analyze a few strategies.

Teaser Page Strategies

Create a Strong Identity

As stated, the first dimension of a good teaser is memorability. One way to achieve this is with a strong brand. By “brand,� I mean all of the visual attributes that people associate with your product: logo, colors, style, etc. Once you launch, the website could end up looking very different than the teaser page, so having a strong brand is a great way to maintain continuity.

Many websites combine an attractive logo and strong color scheme to establish the brand’s identity, without even telling you what they do. It doesn’t have to be just color or a logo, though.

As for Piictu, nothing in its teaser stands out at first glance, but the care given to the overall design (from the subtle background pattern to the combination of typefaces and colors) is memorable in itself, putting the application in a class of its own.

Talkbee (see the screenshot below) is a personal project of mine. I decided that I wanted a strong design with bright colors and a memorable logo to differentiate it from the competition.

The logo is prominent on Talkbee, and the whole page is designed around it.

Use a Gimmick

One design detail trumps even great branding: a gimmick, something special that people haven’t seen before. One of the most famous examples of this was the teaser page for Silverback, which included a CSS parallax effect (you can still see the effect on the current website if you resize your browser window). The website went viral in social circles and became hugely popular on the strength of that little CSS trick alone.

The Kickoff‘s teaser page features a subtle yet nice illustration and a small email subscription box..

One popular technique that you could use to achieve a “gimmick” is animations, today usually created with CSS transitions and CSS animations. Animations could quickly get overwhelming and frustrating on “realâ€� websites, but they’re appropriate in small doses in teasers. Recent examples of teasers with animation are Cloudring and Kickoff.

Ben the Bodyguard draws you in with storytelling.

Another interesting techniques is to use vertical scrolling to tell a story. The poster child for this is certainly Ben the Bodyguard which doesn’t provide all information right away but rather unfolds a story using animations and scrolling.

A very similar idea was used by Dayri and the beautiful Youzee. The technique is successful because storytelling helps people make sense of their environment in a logical and linear way. A linear story hooks us much more effectively than disjointed facts.

Leverage the Power of Social Circles

A more interesting recent development in design of “coming sooon” pages is to include viral mechanisms in the pre-registration process itself. The simplest form of this is a simple “Tweet this pageâ€� button on the page.

LaunchRock, a service that lets you quickly generate a teaser page of your own, takes this a step further. After registering for a LaunchRock-powered website, the user gets a personalized link to the teaser. The more people register through this link, the sooner the user gets access to the website. In fact, LaunchRock itself uses this technique: in order to create your own teaser website through LaunchRock, you need to get three other people to sign up to the service… Confused yet?

The teaser for Cowritable, powered by LaunchRock.

Another interesting idea is used by the “king of viral sign-ups” Dabble.in. Sharing Dabble.in’s link won’t get you early access. Instead, if multiple people request the same user name when signing up (say, “Johnâ€�), then whoever gets more people to sign up wins the user name, while the others have to settle for less desirable alternatives (like, say, “John1986â€�).

Dabble.in lets you win your preferred user name.

If you’d rather not go to these extremes, then simple “Tweet� and “Like� buttons are still a good way to encourage people to spread the word. Of course, the easier it is for visitors to share your link, the more they’ll do it.

Give Something Back

Probably the most effective way to make people share your teaser is to not just help them reserve a special spot, but also give something in return. For example, if enough of your friends sign up, Fab.com gives you up to $50 in website credit.

Fab.com knows that nothing motivates people like money.

But you don’t have to offer money. You can imagine all sorts of deals: free icons, WordPress themes, etc. Even better, offer the product itself. For example, for every person you refer to its service, Dropbox credits you both with extra storage. The best part is that this strategy won’t cost you anything until you’ve actually launched, and even then, because it’s your own product, the costs remain low.

Make People Want It

A word of warning. No matter how clever the viral trick, it won’t matter if people don’t actually want to use your app. As smart as Dabble.in’s sign-up process is, nothing on the website hints at what the app actually does. The effect is that many users might find no incentive to share the teaser, because they’re not even sure why they’d want access to the website.

This is why the vast majority of teasers fail: they simply don’t make you want to use the product. The easy solution is to just come out and say what your product does. Show screenshots, post a short video or write some killer copy.

Youzee’s teaser is so full of eye candy that you can’t help but be curious about the app.

Even if you’re restricted in how much you can say about the product, you still need to make people care. You can do this through exceptional design, as Piictu, Youzee and Kickoff do. People will naturally assume that if your teaser is well designed, the product will be, too.

Collecting Data

Of course, if the teaser is successful and goes viral, you’ll face another problem: what to do with all of these visitors? The easiest thing would be to just collect email addresses and add them to your mailing list. You can use services such as MailChimp or Campaign Monitor to manage your list. Both services make it easy to embed and style a simple form on your page; and then you leave the rest to them.

Prefinery promises to make you happier by removing alien probes from your brain.

You also have more advanced options. For example, Prefinery promises to streamline the pre-launch process, taking care of everything from email collection to beta management. But obtaining data doesn’t necessarily mean collecting email addresses. You could poll visitors on your teaser page using a service like KISSinsights, or use Olark to let visitors chat with you in real time.

A Teaser Template

The teaser should be all about your product and should be tailored to your goals. That being said, I’ve designed a generic template for you to study, adapt and use as is in your own project. (Thanks to Sharypic for letting me use its screenshots.) You can download and use the PSD template for free in all your private or commercial projects.

Download the PSD (.zip, 1.6 MB).

Going Further

The teaser is just one piece of the puzzle. Other important parts of a successful pre-launch campaign are a Twitter account, Facebook page, blog, and others. Unlike on a teaser page, which is usually a one-way medium, people can reply to your tweets and leave comments on your blog. These channels are valuable because they help you get feedback on new ideas and maybe even correct course to better target your market.

Resources

• LaunchRock
• MailChimp
• Campaign Monitor
• Teaser pages on ThemeForest
• Placeholder theme from WooThemes
• “Designing Coming Soon Pages,â€� Smashing Magazine
• “What’s the Best Launch Strategy for a Startup?,â€� Robert Scoble

Disclaimer

I’m involved in a few of the start-ups mentioned in this article. Talkbee is my own personal project, and I do design for Cowritable and Cloudring.

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© Sacha G for Smashing Magazine, 2011. | Permalink | Post a comment | Smashing Shop | Smashing Network | About Us
Post tags: branding, Showcases